What started off as an unorganised party of Russian surfer dudes has now turned into one of the most important events in the calendars of the new, burgeoning, affluent, young middle classes of Russia and Ukraine.
I then watched a lone local surfer ride a wave all the way in, pick up his board and jog up the beach towards me.
But clearly, very few children agree with adults that they are in deep trouble.In this section Discontents, wintry and otherwise That curious relationship Breaking the rule book White-out Cash-hungry Caveat surfer What ails them?
The basic idea behind pay-per-click is that advertisers bid in an online auction for the right to have their link displayed next to the results for specific search terms—"used cars", for instance, or "digital cameras"—and then pay only when a web surfer actually clicks on that link (hence "pay-per-click").
A web surfer might click on such a button and talk live to the advertiser's salesperson, at which point eBay would charge the advertiser.A San Francisco company called Ingenio pioneered this approach in 1999 and already makes a decent living by placing toll-free numbers for local businesses on the results pages of search engines.
"It's as if a storm wiped out Wall Street," says Mr Bilbray, a surfer.
Garage tinkerers like Jack O'Neill, who lost an eye experimenting with a prototype leash (a cord that attaches surfer to board), became successful entrepreneurs.
The advertiser pays only when a surfer actually clicks on their link (37 cents per click, on average).Overture, launched in 1997 as GoTo.com, pioneered this advertising model, variously known as "paid search" or "pay-per-click".
In some cases, when a surfer clicks on an ad, the blog's author gets a share of the revenues.Even so, blogs are a more challenging proposition than search results.
Instead he has ended up losing the headlines in a three-way fight to the Democrats' Donna Frye, a 52-year-old sun-bleached blonde surfer-turned-activist councilwoman and open-government campaigner whose frequent campaign aide was a shaggy-haired dog called Diogenes.Has Mr Murphy, a former judge, lost the election, too?
It perhaps helped that one of them, Bill Tai, a Valley-based tech investor, can keep an eye on things during his regular visits Down Under as a kite-surfer.
